24-May-2014

11-Sep-2012

Julian Assange is holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London, which is basically equivalent to being under house arrest, making Ecuador’s granting of asylum somewhat moot. Usually in these situations, embassy staff will hustle the asylum seeker out in a diplomatic car, but the Ecuadorian embassy doesn’t have on-grounds parking, so those few feet of British-jurisdiction sidewalk between the embassy door and the street are causing him much consternation. How might he leave the embassy grounds?

1) Stick diplomatic plates on one of these bad boys and have him step into its cab from a balcony or roof.

2) In Europe, fugitive rapists get to walk free if they’re famous filmmakers. Assange is already famous, so all he has to do is make a movie, and he can be confident the court will reverse itself on extraditing him.

3) A bunch of helium balloons will lift a lawn chair and occupant, so he can wait for a strong wind blowing to the southeast and float away to France.

15-Aug-2010

So, Vinay Deolalikar has a purported proof that P ≠ NPhere. But there must be some error, because I just came up with this simple proof that P = NP !(If you think “joke proof” sounds like an oxymoron, you can stop reading here.)

Let W(m) ➙ s be a member of NP.
Let X(m; n) ➙ s be the first n symbols of W(m). X is obviously in NP.
So, X has a verifier V(m; n; s) in P.
We can find the first symbol t1 of an output of W(m) by trying V(m; 1; c1), V(m; 1; c2), … for all the symbols ci in the alphabet.
We can find the second symbol t2 by trying V(m; 2; t1c1), V(m; 2; t1c2), etc.
And so on for all the symbols t3, t4, … in the output of W(m).
Finding each symbol takes c calls to V, where c is the alphabet size, a constant. Each call of V takes polynomial time, so we can calculate each individual symbol in polynomial time.
The length of the output of W(m) is necessarily polynomial in ∥m∥, so we have a polynomial number of symbols, each calculable in polynomial time, so we can calculate the entirety of W(m) in polynomial time, so W ∈ P.P=NP. QED